New Story & Nanowrimo

I'll be releasing a new story in the next few days.  It's a m/m story called "Saturday Night" which is not a particularly fascinating title, but there are handcuffs.  :)  Its about a cop who pulls a guy over and gets a little more than he bargained for. I wrote if for an anthology last month but missed the deadline.  It's been languishing on my computer with hopes that another call would crop up, but I don't see that happening any time soon.  So, "Saturday Night", coming out as soon as my copy editor gets off his butt and double-checks my grammar.  

I'm thinking about bundling it with "Brian is Gay (and so am I)" for a limited time as an incentive to buy.

And Nanowrimo starts in a few hours! I'm doing a paranormal romance between a werewolf and a witch set in the Dead End Streets universe--the same world as "Drain Me Dry."  I'm excited to write about the werewolves because they are pretty different from most weres.  The characters are Stella Child--a witch who is trying to find companionship in a world where she keeps her powers a secret even as vampires and werewolves wander out in the open--and Max is a wolf rebelling against the constraints society has put on him and his kind. They meet on accident, or fate, and Stella is pulled into the were subculture...and a murder investigation.

So, busy month!  I'm also working on a novella and a full collection of erotic fairy tales.

A Post on Cover Design

I don't buy my covers.  Sure it would be great to be able to pay a professional designer for a cover, but these are all one dollar short stories, that frankly I don't sell many copies of.  I can't afford to buy a cover for every single one of them.  So all of the covers are my own work.  To tell the truth I think some of them look better than the 'professional' covers on some of the anthologies I've contributed to.  The art on Fraternal Devotion for example is...iffy.  The cover of Riding the Rocket is downright scary.

Not that I'm some brilliant graphic designer.  I think the covers for 'Boy' and 'Shoes' are lacking immensely.  'Cherry Bomb' is my favorite which is amusing because its my least favorite of my works that I have up here.  I really like 'Drain Me Dry' but there are a few problems with it.  The first is that I wanted a completely different cover image.  A bare back is so easy and cheap.  The problem is, there really is no such thing as a free stock image that features kinky gay vampires.  The second is that it shrank very badly on most sites for some reason.  Here the image is clear and easy to read, but its kinda blurry everywhere else unless you blow it up.  Ugh.

I know I should be trying to design my covers so that they are fairly uniform, branded, as it were.  But I'm still learning what works and what doesn't, and I'm limited by the art that is available for free.  For example, I wanted a gender-neutral bare back and full cover image for 'Boy'.  I couldn't find any--the one I ended up with was a woman in a dress and I had to crop around all of the clothing, leaving me with a tiny image that couldn't be blown up.  So I had to improvise.  It's not perfect, but it's not bad.  The font isn't over-used and it is fancy while still being readable.  The sub-heading font is what I use on most of my covers for my name.  I know simple is better when it comes to this kind of thing.

I have another story coming out soon.  It is one of those very little plot mostly porn stories, but the cover I've designed doesn't look like porn at all.  So I think I will have to dump it and try again, even though it is a very nice cover:

Free Always: Boy

I want to offer more permanent free stories on here, so here's one from the vaults--"Boy."

This is pure erotica with not much in the way of plot.  A woman picks up a young inexperienced butch girl at a bar and takes her home to "be her boy."  It's pretty gender-queer as it is two lesbians role playing as two men.  If you would like to read it as a trans story you certainly can.

Free to download always on Smashwords.  Click Here

Free Download: Drain Me Dry

Okay.  Drain Me Dry is edited and ready to go.  I'm offering this story free until midnight on Wednesday.  Please be a kind and gracious reader and review it if you like it.  (If you hate it you can skip the review, obviously.)

Click here to go to the story.

Synopsis:

19 year old Jamie has had it with living.  He has a terrible job, no friends, and his home life is unbearable.  He wants to end it all, but is too frightened to slit his own wrists.  Instead he goes to The Victorian, a seedy underground blood den for vampires and their groupies, where he hopes to find an angel of death to end it all for him.  Instead he finds Damian, who has much sexier things on his mind than death.  Will Jamie succeed in his plan of suicide by vampire, or will he get an unexpected HEA?

This story is m/m paranormal erotica.  It contains BDSM, anal sex, dubious consent, blood play, age gap (116 years), bjs.  

Trigger warnings: suicidal thoughts, abuse.

word count: 8,000